Your house keys may be obsolete

You can now open your front door with a smartphone. But should you?

The days of lugging around house keys may soon be over, with a handful of companies now offering a convenient alternative: your smartphone. But if you can unlock your front door with a phone, can a burglar do the same?

Several new products that let consumers unlock doors with a smartphone have already—or soon will--hit the market. UniKey’s Kwikset Kevo lock ($219), which lets you unlock your door by simply touching the lock with your finger (you can leave your smartphone in your pocket), went on sale in October. You can now preorder the August Smart Lock ($199) and the new version of the Lockitron ($179), both of which sense your smartphone in your pocket and unlock your door, as well as the Goji Smart Lock, perhaps the most ambitious (and pricey, starting at $278) of the bunch. The Goji not only unlocks your door with a smartphone, it also takes photos of people entering your home and emails or texts you the images. And it alerts you if you leave your home and forget to lock the door. “In the next couple years, we’ll see high percentage growth but low numbers” for smartphone-enabled home locks, says Frank Gillett, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. “In three to five years, this will start to become mainstream,” he predicts.

Businesses too are experimenting with smartphone entry. Starwood Hotels announced that by the end of next year, it hopes all guests in its W Hotels and Aloft Hotels will be able to enter their rooms with their smartphones. It is piloting the program in two hotels, the Aloft Harlem in New York City and the Aloft Cupertino in California, beginning in the next two months. Some corporations and small businesses have also been testing this technology.

In both cases, the purpose is to make entering a building or room simpler. “You don’t even have to pull your smartphone out of your pocket,” says Phil Dumas, founder of Unikey. “It’s much more convenient than a traditional key.” Or as Cameron Robertson, the co-founder of Lockitron, puts it, “it’s great if you have your hands full with groceries…and if you want to Airbnb your house or let someone into your home when you’re halfway across the city.”

The locks have other features that are designed to appeal to tech-savvy consumers. A number of the locks let you send a “virtual key” to other people, which can make it easy to accommodate visiting guests or staff like a nanny or dog walker; you can also retract the keys if you part ways with people. Many of these locks also keep a record of who’s entered and exited your home, and offer a backup mechanism (sometimes with a little card that can live on a key chain or in your glovebox) to get into your house should your smartphone die. And Goji’s lock even has an LED screen that greets people entering your home by name and has a built-in camera that can take photos of visitors.

While that all sounds convenient and easy, the biggest question in consumers’ minds is whether these kinds of locks are any more effective at keeping intruders out than traditional keys. For their part, the companies say they are highly focused on security and use the latest encryption and other security measures. But attorney and security expert Mark Weber Tobias says that it’s too early for us to know how easily these can be hacked and warns that “these guys are software guys not security guys.” He adds that the potential for security breaches could be high: “There could be serious peril if this isn’t done right,” he says--meaning that a lot of criminals could hack into a lot of houses if the security isn’t top-notch. And Adam Levin, co-founder and chairman of identity management company Identity Theft 911, says that “using the app on an unprotected, unfamiliar Wi-Fi connection could give hackers access to your home, and saving your password in the phone could give a phone thief both your phone and your keys.” Plus, he adds, plenty of us have left our phones somewhere.

But Gillett points out that most people’s current traditional locks on their doors aren’t exactly crime-busting. “Many of us have a lock that a locksmith could open in moments,” he says. “We already live in a world where determined people can get into our homes easily.” And both Gillet and Tobias note that down the road, these kinds of locks are likely to get even more secure.

To be sure, safety notwithstanding, the locks can fail. Some consumers complain about battery problems. A writer for Popular Mechanics who tried one of these locks came home one day to find that “one of the batteries had burst and was leaking potassium hydroxide electrolyte.” Gillett says some “sound like a metal grinder and some aren’t aesthetically pleasing and add bulk to the door. Plus, the locks often require a specific, newer version of Bluetooth technology and software, that is built into newer smartphones such as the iPhone 4S or later versions, or specific Android models, he says. There can also be tech glitches, and consumers typically have to get these locks installed, which adds an additional cost.

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